David Farnor | On 10, Jul 2015

The BBC has released the first clip and a new image from the Sherlock special, which is expected to broadcast at Christmas this year.

The show, which has won fans worldwide with its witty modern update of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, will travel back to Victorian times for the one-off story, which will be a standalone historical adventure from the main series.

“It’s like we checked the books and discovered we’d set it in the wrong time period by mistake and it’s like we’re correcting it,” said creator Steven Moffat ahead of a Comic-Con panel today, where they presented the first glimpse of Sherlock, 1890s-style.

Joining Moffat was actor Rupert Graves, who plays Inspector LeStrade in the programme opposite Martin Freeman’s Dr. John Watson and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes.

“I had to play him as a Victorian copper… whatever that means,” Graves told Digital Spy, adding that the “dynamics are very similar, but the tone is different”.

“We’re really proud of it, we think it’s a real cracker,” added Moffat. “But that’ll be it until series four.”

Season 4 will arrive at some point in 2017, with Moffat and co-creator Mark Gatiss yet to start writing the episodes. They have said, however, that it will be a dark entry in the Sherlock series, with an emphasis on consequences.

“We’ve got a clear idea of what we’re going to do and it’s going to be another shift in tone,” Moffat told Digital Spy.

“It was the never the plan,” he added of the show’s gap between seasons, which is largely due to the busy schedules of both Freeman and Cumberbatch, “but I don’t think it hurts. It’s interesting that starvation works as well as it does.”

Here’s the clip:

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